Fear of a dreaded disease has been part of the bargain for years. Shame came slower, as smokers were cast from offices, restaurants and even bars. Now, in New York City, there is yet another scary side effect to smoking: empty pockets.

As a new $1.25 state tax took effect on Tuesday, making the combined tax in New York City the nation’s highest and pushing the price of a pack of cigarettes above $8 in most places, many smokers around the city swore they were stopping, even as they bought what they promised would be their last pack.

Barbette Gaines, 47, who started smoking when she was 12, said she was in a bad mood after paying $8.90 for Newports at a deli on the Lower East Side, and was considering calling a cessation hotline.

Violeta Mujovic, a clerk at the Always Love Discount Smoke Shop on the Upper West Side — which advertises “cigarettes sold at the lowest price in NYC” — said that about two dozen customers complained as they forked over $8.15 a pack on Tuesday morning, but two people stormed out empty-handed.

“They said they were quitting and just left,” said Ms. Mujovic, 23, who smokes a pack a day herself and said she had called the city’s 311 line to sign up for a program that provides quitters with free nicotine gum. “It is just too ridiculous.”

Cigarette prices in the city have been going up steadily in recent years, and taxes now total $4.25 a pack: $2.75 for the state and $1.50 in city taxes that began in 2002.

At a news conference to announce the new tax Tuesday, city and state health officials cited studies showing that smoking rates decrease as cigarette prices rise, and said they expected that up to 140,000 of the city’s 1 million smokers would quit because of the increased cost.

They said that the state expected to raise $265 million in new revenue from the tax, but that the revenue was dwarfed by the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses in the state, which they estimated at about $8.2 billion a year.

“At a pack a day, smoking is now a $3,000-a-year habit in New York City,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said at the news conference at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. “Quitting now will not only improve your health, but it will save you money you can use for yourself or your family.”

The immediate reaction from smokers across the city ranged from resignation to outrage. Outside the Rosebank Tavern on Staten Island, Mike Sheehy, 49, saw the $8.75 he just paid at a nearby deli for a pack of Marlboro Lights as an affront to his liberty.

“The Revolution was backed by tobacco,” he said, cigarette in hand. “That’s where we got our dough from during the Revolutionary War. That’s the crop that built America. We’re true Americans.”

In Downtown Brooklyn, Oleg Gulchinsky, a 67-year-old immigrant from Ukraine with an open pack of Misty 100s in his breast pocket, said, “Time to stop smoke and begin drink vodka.”

“I joke,” Mr. Gulchinsky said. “But it’s too bad. I understand people say it’s no good. But for me it’s good, it’s my choice.”

In Woodside, Queens, Chris Bastianos, 47, said he could not bring himself to end his 30-year-affair with tobacco — yet. “If it went over $10 a day I’d stop,” he said.

There undoubtedly are some places where a pack already tops $10. Random sampling showed a range of prices around the city: a newsstand on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village had Marlboro Lights for $9, while the Big J Deli in Woodside, Queens, was selling them for $6.75 (a clerk said he was not aware of when the taxes took effect). The large drug stores were in the middle of the range, with Marlboro Lights costing $8.51 at a CVS in Midtown.

Shahid Akhter, who opened the Amazing Store and Smoke Shop on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side a month ago, said that past increases caused business to drop slightly, but that crossing the $8 threshold — especially as the cost of everything from oil to eggs continued to rise — was likely to have a bigger effect.